cult of fools

The Cult of Fools (Apr 16, 2023) – “The Real Cause of Child Sexual Abuse”

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By bdk, CC BY-SA 3.0

This past week Jeanne Casteen said something that deserves a great deal more attention. It was during an AZ Peoria unified school board meeting.

Here it is …

Here is a transcript …

Good evening, my name is Jeannie Castine.

Part of my job includes research of child sexual abuse CSA. I hear a lot of attempts to connect CSA with trans people, but it couldn’t be further from the truth, and it fact, trans women suffer some of the highest sexual abuse in the United State.

So I want to share some US stats. This is just from this past month where there were over 100 legal cases of CSA, and not one of the perpetrators was trans. As a matter of fact, in the United State, 93% of child sexual abuse perpetrators consider themselves religious, and most present Predators charged or convicted last month are religious leaders, not trans people.

This week the courts upheld an Arizona law that excepts clergy from reporting CSA, so not only is the reading of scripture at school board meetings a violation of The Establishment Clause, but it very well may be damaging to audience members and constituents who have experienced religious traumatic abuse.

Another bill in AZ this year would have mandated that private religious school staff obtained fingerprint clearance cards like Public School staff, but it didn’t even get a hearing. Every anti-trans Bill did though. Just yesterday Missouri Senator Mike Moon, who claims to be a Christian, said he thinks that 12 year old children should be married off by their parents. There seems to be a pattern here, and I heard the speakers say, “Humans take advantage of certain situations”. They certainly do.

I see a pattern …

  • Evangelical electives Target the LGBT community – check.
  • Religious leaders exempt from reporting child sexual abuse – check.
  • No staff background checks in religious schools – check.
  • Child marriage, guess it’s a-okey – check.
  • Violating constitutional oath and quoting scripture that requires unquestioning obedience to an abuse male god – check.

There is a trend … (she is interrupted at this point) … she says, it’s my turn, it’s my turn please … (she continues)

There is a trend of scapegoating trans students to distract people from actual abusers.

Trans people are far more likely to be victims of sexual abuse. Now that Arizona is using my tax dollars to fund religious discrimination and indoctrination centers that protect actual groomers, parents can go there.

I’m not saying that Peoria shouldn’t hire Christians as employees, thankfully because you do have to be fingerprinted in this District. I just hope that the scapegoating of our most vulnerable student population will stop, because our public schools are for everyone. Thank you.

(She gets a round of applause)

Now that truly is an excellent speech, she truly nails it by calling out what is really going on.

Your kids are totally safe at a drag show. You should however be deeply concerned when taking them to church. Statistically and factually, that is where all the abuse continues to happen. The two words that should strike deep fear into your heart are not, “drag queen”, but instead are “youth pastor”.

Moving on, below you will once again find my usual selection of some truly bizarre and extreme claims that have popped up during the last 7 days. Each is laced with my snarky commentary. With my usual hat tip to my various sources, let’s dive in.

Enjoy.

The Cult of Trump

Mark Burns argues that God always raises up leaders and deliverers like Abraham, Moses, Esther, Samuel, David, Solomon, and former President Donald Trump: “I believe God has chosen Donald J. Trump for such a time as this to lead our nation out of the evil that we are going [through].”

  • Why does the supposedly chosen one of God pay more for Sex than he does for Taxes?
  • Incidentally, as a reminder, Mark Burns is a proven liar who was confronted on camera by CCN regarding his fictitious biography – clip here.

Lance Wallnau Warns That God Will Soon Start Killing Those Who Are ‘Persecuting’ Trump

  • If you are in any way worried, then don’t be. So far exactly none of Lance’s predictions have panned out.
  • And yes, he also promotes the idea that the pussy-grabber-in-chief is the choose one of God.
  • You can bookmark this, because he set a date when he claimed “it looks to me like there could be some sudden deaths coming in May“. So I have a prediction, one that requires exactly zero supernatural ability. When May comes and then goes, nothing will have happened except perhaps him moving the date for his prediction.

Christian Nationalism

Rachel Hamm, a Christian Nationalist who lost her race to become California’s secretary of state, says our society is dumber because lots of people have “no reverence for God.” Her proof? A cashier didn’t know how much change to give her.

  • Well yes of course. As we all well remember, “how to make change” was one of the core sunday school lessons we all got. Without attending none of us would ever have been able to make change.
  • Reminder: This is the lady who previously explained that she was running as California’s secretary of sate because her toddler was getting prophetic visions from God in her closet. (I bet you are thinking that I just made that up. I wish I was, but no, that’s literally what she claimed)
  • Meanwhile Rachel Hamm is now so confident that God “has anointed Donald Trump to be president” that she’s apparently considering moving from California to Florida solely because she thinks that she would make a great press secretary: “I think being press secretary is an excellent role for me.”

“pro-life” & Guns

Pew Research: “The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021”

  • This stark reality has been enabled by the “pro-life” people in the country.

Stew Peters believes he knows which issues must first be “handled” before this nation can stop the epidemic of gun violence: “Transgenderism” and “LGBTQ.”

  • Stew appears to be running his account as a full on parody these days.
  • This is of course the same guy who thinks the earth is flat.
  • Things not on his list “sensible gun regulations”

“Messianic Rabbi” Jonathan Cahn attempted to prove that the perpetrator of the recent mass shooting in Nashville was demon-possessed by noting that the three children killed were all 9 years old: “What happens if you turn it upside down? 666.”

  • If we take his age, multiply that by a random number I’m thinking of, then add in or subtract a few random digits, finally flip that upside down, we get ‘666’. Yep, “astonishing” stuff.
  • Even more amazing, if I type 5318008 into a calculator then when I turn it upside down it spells “boobies” … equally spooky.
  • “Messianic Rabbi” – Jewish, and yet also Christian, which basically means that this guy is an Evangelical with a Torah fetish. Putting terms together like this is as meaningful as “Christian Imam”.
  • In essence, “FFS” is the correct response when faced with stuff like this coming from people with weird made-up religious titles.
  • Incidentally, this is not a one-time-only deal, he occasionally pops up on Newsmax to do weird numerical claims.

GOP “Healthcare”

Regarding the above event, right-wing religion fanatic Tony Perkins comments … “@GovRonDeSantis is doing this the right way—he is having the conversation about protecting unborn children. We need more leaders like him who are willing to lean into the opportunity that the Supreme Court gave us in the Dobbs decision.“

  • Hemant Mehta correctly observes: “Ah, yes. That’s why DeSantis signed his extreme abortion ban behind closed doors, late at night, with no media present. To lean into the opportunity and have “the conversation.”

Homophobia on Steroids

Right-wing pastor Rob McCoy spoke in Michigan recently, where he lashed out at Christians who refuse to “contend with the Alphabet mafia” and made sure to remind the audience that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s name “rhymes with Hitler.”

  • You can play juvenile rhyming games with any name … for example “MyCoy – Sex Toy”.
  • It’s all exactly as Jesus said … “Love your Neighbour, but if they are gay then all bets are off, you can hate them“.

Megachurch Pastor Jack Hibbs Launches Nationwide Campaign to Out LGBTQ Students

  • Christians often rant about “Christian Persecution”. The wee bit of detail they often neglect to mention is that it is not them receiving the persecution, but rather it will be them vigorously going after the most vulnerable people in society and doing the persecuting.
  • Quote from Pastor Jack Hibbs: “the belief that this nation is a “democracy” is dangerous. A democracy steals your kids, kidnaps them, so to speak, at school and takes control,”

Florida Republican Rep. Webster Barnaby directly compared trans people to mutants in X-Men and called the trans people, including children, present in the room “demons and imps.” This was during debate for HB1421 that would criminalize trans people using bathrooms.

  • Only a Republican could manage to watch an X-Men movie and conclude that the X-Men were the bad guys.
  • It is quite frankly jaw dropping that he actually missed a core storyline of X-Men. It is literally all about marginalised innocent people who are villainised, hated, and feared by small minded bigots.

Ali’s Rant of the week

This past week Ali Alexander brags that he “started an insurrection” and warns that if he ever became president, he’d immediately start locking up journalists: “I think there are a ton of journalists that frankly need to be jailed.”

  • I can safely predict with a high degree of certainty that he will never be president. My opening bid on that is the observation that he was not born in the US.
  • Reminder: In previous weekly rants he has claimed that he is a time traveller, and also that he is just like Jesus.

Not “Cancel Culture”

Jason Rapert declares that any educator who teaches about gender issues “should be fired.” But, he insists, “No, that’s not the cancel culture. That’s what the left does.”

Defund All Libraries

“Missouri House Republicans voted to defund all of the state’s public libraries, in a proposed $45.6 billion state budget that will soon move to a vote in the GOP-controlled state Senate“

  • First it was books, now it is entire libraries.
  • Banning books instead of guns means that they are far more terrified of kids learning than of them dying
  • If you are wonder why they did this, its revenge. The ACLU sued the state on behalf of Librarians seeking to declare Senate Bill 775 unconstitutional, a bill that has resulted in over 300 books getting banned from school libraries. This is their response to that.
  • It’s not yet a done deal, it goes to a Senate vote and then governor’s desk.

Truly Bizarre

Nick Fuentes declares that “Jews commune with demons” and “a lot of them are Satanists.”

  • The bizarreness of this claim is that it is a trope that it is so old, it dates to the 12th century. I can only wonder if he needed an archaeologist to dig this conspiracy claim up

Scott Lively warns that “America’s ‘Ark’ is our Bible-based constitution, which was stolen by our own home-grown Philistines who also destroyed our ‘Shiloh’ in the election coup of 2020/21.” What comes next? “We will never again return to self-rule under law” and instead be doomed to suffer under “an Antichrist.”

  • And this week’s “Religious word soup” award goes to … Scott Lively.
  • The “stolen constitution” claim feels like the plot of a Nicholas Cage movie (to be specific, this one)
  • As for being … “doomed to suffer under an antichrist” … nah, been there, done that. He got indicted last week.

The “Elijah Streams” program has gone full QAnon because, says host Steve Shultz, “it’s come to a point where this subject can’t be avoided anymore because is so blatantly clear and obvious” that the QAnon conspiracy theory is true.

  • Steve tends to only have the weirdest of the weird self-appointed “prophets” on his program these days, such as Kerr and Bullock. When you emotionally invest in folks like that, then going full-QAnon is perhaps a natural outcome.

Former President Barack Obama has been out of office for years, but Stew Peters is still out there promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory.

  • His “evidence” is an image of a passport. If he bothered to fact check, a concept quite unknown to Stew, he would discover that the passport actually belonged to Barack Obama sr, the passport of the President’s dad. He moved to America in 1959, that’s the date on the passport image. This really is not rocket science to work it out. President Barack Obama was born in 1961, a date two years after the date in that passport image.

Isabella Riley Moody, a podcaster who has no children, has some advice for other women: “Talk Less. Have babies.”

  • Basically, go home, stay in the kitchen, cook, churn out babies, and remain silent. That’s clearly a real vote winner.
  • I do have to admit that she is getting rather good at strangling the corpse of irony.

According to Charlie Kirk, the Bible is true because it’s really old and still popular.

  • Old and popular … The Epic of Gilgamesh, Shakespeare, lots of ancient Greek plays written long before the NT, the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, etc… using his “logic” would imply that all these, and and many more old and popular texts, are all “true”.
  • Then again, just how popular is the Bible? It’s one of those books that every Christian has as part of their posing kit, but many of them don’t actually read.

Infighting

While Republican officials and right-wing activists relentlessly attack Democrats and LGBTQ people as pedophiles and “groomers,” Milo Yiannopoulos has been alleging that “Stop The Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has a long history of propositioning underage males.

  • The only real dilemma here is that neither Milo nor Ali are credible sources for any information on anything at all … ever.
  • Meanwhile, attempting to defend his handling of the allegations that Ali Alexander has a history of propositioning underage males, Nick Fuentes admits that knew that “Ali was bisexual” and that “he flirted with me when I was, you know, 19 or 20.”

The False Profit$

Self-Appointed Prophet Johnny Enlow believes the fact that the winning teams in the recent men’s and women’s NCAA basketball championship games both won by 17 points is evidence that “God is working a plan of victory” though the QAnon movement.

  • If you are wondering what his “logic” is, it’s this. God apparently rigged an NCAA basketball game such that it was won by 17 points. That’s supposedly a reference to 1 Samual 17 where David defeats Goliath, therefore the win was a “clear” message that (insert whatever claim you want to have happen) is going to happen – so yes, he really is this crazy.
  • Will he be doing God talking to us via cricket scores from games in India next week?
  • Meanwhile, the bible does explicitly state that people who practices divination, or tell fortunes, or interprets omens, are an abomination. (It really does)

Christian “prophet” Donna Rigney dreamed she was marrying Jesus, and God gave them the greatest wedding present of all: “The United States of America.“

  • One can only wonder if she will be going into graphic details of the honeymoon next week.

Interesting Articles

Statistic of the week

Some do get it right

I should perhaps point out that some people who are religious really can do honourable noble decent things. If right-wing evangelicals did stuff like this instead of striving to be totally obnoxious gobshites, the world would truly be a far better place …

Nebraska Updates

In response to the suggestion that they need to stop their filibuster …

This was never a serious option

Best response to the above: “After careful consideration and prayer, I have decided that I will not put myself forward as a suitor for Halle Berry’s plus 1 to the Oscars. I will be taking no further questions at this time.“

I’d speculate that the Pompeo fan club are now utterly devastated … all one of them.

Meanwhile …

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